Moiseiwitsch in Extremis
Pearl GEMM CDS 9192 (2 CDs, 154:58)
Here’s the thing about late Moiseiwitsch—and this Pearl set from 1961 makes it painfully, gloriously clear: the fingers may betray, but the musical intelligence never does.
These recordings, salvaged from reel-to-reel tapes at the University of Texas (dubbed from originals that were cannibalized for reuse—imagine that casual destruction), document recitals from the pianist’s seventy-first year. The sound wavers, wobbles occasionally, carries that peculiar flutter endemic to tape technology of the era. But through the sonic gauze emerges something more valuable than pristine engineering: Moiseiwitsch thinking aloud at the keyboard about composers he’d lived with for half a century.
The Schumann is revelatory. Not because it’s flawless—far from it—but because these three major works (Études Symphoniques, Kreisleriana, Carnaval) expose the architecture of his interpretive philosophy. He’d called Schumann his favorite composer, spoke of him with what contemporaries described as reverence bordering on devotion, yet never recorded the Études Symphoniques or Kreisleriana commercially. What madness of the disc industry kept these works out of the studio? Here at last we hear why colleagues insisted his Schumann possessed uncommon authority.
The Études Symphoniques interpretation is splashy, yes—the "finale" particularly so, with octaves that don’t quite land together and inner voices that blur into impressionistic washes. But listen to how he shapes the theme itself, that noble descending bass line. Each variation emerges not as technical display but as psychological development, character study in sound. The “Etude III” has genuine wit, a conversational quality in its voicing that recalls Clara Schumann’s own reported manner at the piano. When he reaches “Etude IX” (the famous one, with its yearning melodic arch), the tone becomes almost unbearably tender despite—or perhaps because of—the technical fraying at the edges.
Kreisleriana proves even more fascinating. This is music that defeats pianists half his age, music that demands not just fingers but sustained imaginative fever. Moiseiwitsch gives us the latter in abundance. The first movement has genuine delirium, that Hoffmannesque madness Schumann intended, though the execution turns approximate in the more treacherous passages. No matter. The “Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch” second movement achieves something rarer than accuracy: it achieves intimacy. You hear a man communing with ghosts, with Schumann’s fractured psyche, with his own mortality perhaps.
The Chopin tells a different story. That B-flat Minor Sonata—never recorded commercially, another inexplicable gap—sounds effortful here. The famous funeral march emerges with appropriate gravitas, but the first movement’s double-note passages show the inevitable toll of age. Compare this to his legendary 1925 Chopin Études recordings and the decline is audible. Yet even here, listen to how he conceives the larger paragraphs, how he makes the development section’s modulations feel inevitable rather than arbitrary. The Op. 10, No. 4 C-sharp Minor Étude, which he’d recorded so brilliantly in his prime, now arrives with muddied inner voices and a handful of wrong notes. But that essential conception—fleet, pearly, almost orchestral in its voicing—remains fundamentally unchanged across thirty-six years.
The Barcarolle fares better. This is music that rewards maturity, that asks for breadth rather than flash. His left-hand shaping of those rocking accompaniment figures shows what decades of thinking about Chopin can achieve. The climax builds with genuine architectural sense, not just accumulation of volume.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition provides the set’s most problematic offering. He’d recorded it magnificently for HMV, and this 1961 traversal can’t help but suffer by comparison. “Gnomus” lurches rather than scuttles, “Bydlo” turns ponderous without achieving the requisite weight. Yet “The Old Castle” has that desolate, time-suspended quality the music demands, and “The Great Gate of Kiev” still musters considerable grandeur, even if some of those final chords sound more like controlled crashes than triumphant proclamations.
The Beethoven Andante Favori offers respite—lyric playing that shows his cantabile gift intact, even if some of the more elaborate figurations turn approximate. And Palmgren’s West Finnish Dance ends the proceedings with welcome lightness, a reminder that Moiseiwitsch’s repertoire extended beyond the standard canon.
Pearl’s engineering team has done what they could with the source material. The sound won’t please audiophiles—there’s flutter, occasional dropouts, that general instability inherent in dubbed tapes from sixty-odd years ago. But it’s eminently listenable, and the alternative is silence, is not knowing how Moiseiwitsch actually played this repertoire in public.
Which brings us to the essential question: who needs this set? Anyone serious about Golden Age pianism, certainly. Anyone who wants to understand how a great artist navigates the gap between conception and execution when age intervenes. Anyone curious about Schumann interpretation from a pianist who actually understood what Romantic meant before it became a marketing category.
This isn’t late-career Horowitz, where technical command remained eerily intact. This is something more human, more moving in its way—a great artist still wrestling with great music, still finding things to say even as the physical means begin their inevitable withdrawal. The mind outlasts the fingers. That’s the real story here.
Essential, flaws and all.
